My parents are musicians, as are most of their siblings and many of my cousins. I’ve had my share of music lessons as well, from both my parents. And one of the things my dad used to tell me is, “how do you get into Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.” As a result, I spent much of my childhood learning how to practice. The ultimate problem I ran into was that music didn’t move me the way it moved my parents, my aunts and uncles, and many of my cousins. It’s not that I can’t learn or do it. I can carry a tune when I bother to put the effort in (which makes for a lot of fun with karaoke nights) but music isn’t the language my soul speaks. It’s words, and stories, and stringing them together in a coherent mess of beauty that moves me. My dad has always supported me in this, and when he realized he shifted gears and applied all those early music lessons to what I actually wanted to do.
What those early lessons boiled down to was, like my dad’s joke, practice. It’s constantly writing and rewriting and learning and applying new skills. It’s learning what works for me, and what doesn’t, and how to make a coherent story out of a mess of ideas and inspiration. Writing might not be my dad’s passion, but he was no less excited for me to find my own way, especially when what he had already taught me was so easily applied to other creative disciplines.
Practice really is where it’s at. Frequently an author’s first story won’t be publishable, though there are exceptions. A lot of times though, it’s practice in longform. It’s only through experience we learn about our own writing process, after all, and it’s how we gain practice in tightening up our prose. It’s how we learn to build worlds and characters and hone our storytelling skills.
That’s why all of Dad’s early lessons worked so well outside his own area of expertise. Practice is one of the things all artists of every flavor have to do to hone their craft. Whether you write, draw, paint, play guitar, bake, or anything else, it’s practice that makes perfect. We can’t hone the skills that make our hearts move without practicing, after all, and that’s why Dad was so able to switch gears when my real passion came to the surface. My early skillset as a singer might not directly translate, but the fundamental lessons do. It’s about doing the same thing over and over again so that we can learn how to do each step better next time. Time invested in practicing is never wasted, even if we throw out the story in the end. We still gain valuable experience, after all, experience we didn’t have before deciding this story was not the one that we wanted to tell. And you can always revisit an idea later too. Because sometimes what the story needs is for us to grow, to gain experience and wisdom because it was too ambitious at first. But if we don’t practice, we don’t gain the knowledge to fix it, which is why it’s so important to invest our time and energy into learning and refining.
Time invested in a new skill is never a waste. Even if we don’t follow through to the bitter end, we gain valuable wisdom on how to do the next venture. The lessons might not directly apply, but the wisdom we gain in knowing that this new skill will also take time to develop is still a lesson learned. And isn’t that what life is all about? Gaining wisdom through experience, through repetition, to make everything easier overall? It might not be all that life is about, but it certainly helps.